The world of storage is being transformed by the maturing of flash arrays, an approach to storage that uses multiple, solid state flash memory drives instead of spinning hard disk drives. An all-flash array performs the same functions as traditional spinning disks but in a fraction of the time required and in more compact form factors. Given its superior performance in certain contexts, all-flash arrays are experiencing strong industry adoption. However, best practices and a true understanding of key success factors for all- flash storage are still emerging. This paper is intended to educate you on best practices based on real user experience drawn from ITCentralStation.com. We offer all-flash user advice in selecting and building the business case for a flash array storage solution.

Flash is changing the world
Flash is enabling innovation and business transformation by allowing companies to do things they simply could not have done before.
Innovators, the group with the highest flash adoption, enjoy superior business outcomes across a range of areas.
They have higher revenue growth, profitability, and productivity, and experience shorter time-to-market for new products.
IDC identified steps companies in the other categories can take to understand their level of flash adoption and accelerate flash migration to take greater advantage of the business benefits.
Intel Inside®. Powerful Productivity Outside.
Ultrabook, Celeron, Celeron Inside, Core Inside, Intel, Intel Logo, Intel Atom, Intel Atom Inside, Intel Core, Intel Inside, Intel Inside Logo, Intel vPro, Itanium, Itanium Inside, Pentium, Pentium Inside, vPro Inside, Xeon, Xeon Phi, and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries

Flash is changing the world
Flash is enabling innovation and business transformation by allowing companies to do things they simply could not have done before.
Innovators, the group with the highest flash adoption, enjoy superior business outcomes across a range of areas.
They have higher revenue growth, profitability, and productivity, and experience shorter time-to-market for new products.
IDC identified steps companies in the other categories can take to understand their level of flash adoption and accelerate flash migration to take greater advantage of the business benefits.
Intel Inside®. Powerful Productivity Outside.
Ultrabook, Celeron, Celeron Inside, Core Inside, Intel, Intel Logo, Intel Atom, Intel Atom Inside, Intel Core, Intel Inside, Intel Inside Logo, Intel vPro, Itanium, Itanium Inside, Pentium, Pentium Inside, vPro Inside, Xeon, Xeon Phi, and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Flash is changing the world
Flash is enabling innovation and business transformation by allowing companies to do things they simply could not have done before.
Innovators, the group with the highest flash adoption, enjoy superior business outcomes across a range of areas.
They have higher revenue growth, profitability, and productivity, and experience shorter time-to-market for new products.
IDC identified steps companies in the other categories can take to understand their level of flash adoption and accelerate flash migration to take greater advantage of the business benefits.
Intel Inside®. Bättre produktivitet pa utsidan
Ultrabook, Celeron, Celeron Inside, Core Inside, Intel, Intel Logo, Intel Atom, Intel Atom Inside, Intel Core, Intel Inside, Intel Inside Logo, Intel vPro, Itanium, Itanium Inside, Pentium, Pentium Inside, vPro Inside, Xeon, Xeon Phi, and Xeon Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

As flash costs continue to drop and new, flash-driven designs help to magnify the compelling economic advantages AFAs offer relative to HDD-based designs, mainstream adoption of AFAs —first for primary storage workloads and then ultimately for secondary storage workloads — will accelerate. Well-designed AFAs that still leverage legacy interfaces like SAS will be able to meet many performance requirements over the next year or two.
Those IT organisations that aim to best position themselves to handle future growth will want to look at next-generation AFA offerings, as the future is no longer flash-optimised architectures (implying that HDD design tenets had to be optimised around) —
it is flash-driven architectures.

All-flash storage is on a strong growth trajectory, but the industry is not swooning naively over the blazing fast I/O speeds. Most IT managers are talking a mature, step-by-step approach to all-flash adoption. Falling per-gigabyte prices are making the technology more commonplace. Solid state drives are no longer just for specialized, high-performing tasks. Before they leap, however, storage professionals want to understand the full business picture as they formulate a winning strategy for putting all-flash storage to use for more workloads.
This paper offers insights for business success with all-flash storage based on IT Central Station reviews. Real users weigh in on what it takes to get the most out of the technology. It covers such aspects of flash storage as the need for simplicity and the importance of flexibility. The paper also looks at how to build a business case for all-flash and think through the implications of issues such as integration with existing infrastructure.

This Technology Spotlight examines the evolving primary flash array market with a particular emphasis on what next-generation flash-driven enterprise storage architectures will look like. It also looks at the role Pure Storage, with its FlashArray//X, plays in this strategically important market.

VMware Horizon View is an enterprise-class desktop virtualization solution that delivers virtualized or remote desktops and applications to end users through a single platform. Horizon View is a tightly integrated, end-to-end solution built on the industry-leading virtualization platform, VMware vSphere.
Although Horizon View enables levels of availability and agility of desktop services unmatched by traditional PCs, the complexity of deploying and managing thousands of virtual desktops in a VMware environment can be daunting without the right tools. Storage is often the leading cause of end-user performance problems. The NetApp all-flash FAS solution with the FAS8000 platform solves the performance problems commonly found in VDI deployments.
In this reference architecture, NetApp tested VMware Horizon View user and administrator workloads to demonstrate how the NetApp all-flash FAS solution eliminates the most common barriers to virtual desktop adoption.
The testing covered common

This Technology Spotlight examines the evolving primary flash array market with a particular emphasis on what next-generation flash-driven enterprise storage architectures will look like. It also looks at the role Pure Storage, with its FlashArray//x, plays in this
strategically important market.

"VMware Horizon View is an enterprise-class desktop virtualization solution that delivers virtualized or remote desktops and applications to end users through a single platform. Horizon View is a tightly integrated, end-to-end solution built on the industry-leading virtualization platform, VMware vSphere.
Although Horizon View enables levels of availability and agility of desktop services unmatched by traditional PCs, the complexity of deploying and managing thousands of virtual desktops in a VMware environment can be daunting without the right tools. Storage is often the leading cause of end-user performance problems. The NetApp all-flash FAS solution with the FAS8000 platform solves the performance problems commonly found in VDI deployments.
In this reference architecture, NetApp tested VMware Horizon View user and administrator workloads to demonstrate how the NetApp all-flash FAS solution eliminates the most common barriers to virtual desktop adoption.
The testing covered common

We know that flash storage can provide significant benefits and deliver needed agility for large businesses, but what about medium-sized businesses (MMB = 500 to 999 employees)?
IBM asked Forrester Consulting to look into adoption and use of flash storage technologies by mid-market organizations. A snapshot survey of 106 IT professionals found the following:
› MMBs are actively adopting flash storage
› Flash is exceeding expectations regarding cloud management, flexibility and security
› A majority of respondents expect to continue their investments, with almost half aspiring to an all-flash storage environment.
To learn more download this report.

As the volume of unstructured data created and used continues to increase rapidly, organizations are faced with challenges around data storage. In response, many new technologies — specifically objectbased storage, software-defined storage, all-flash arrays, and cloud-based storage services — are experiencing rapid adoption. Yet object-based storage has been limited by the need to rewrite existing file-based applications — a prospect that is costly and requires more manpower than is practical for many organizations.
Cloudian offers both an object storage platform and more recently an enterprise file services product. When deployed together, Cloudian's products are designed to consolidate file and object data into a single repository and can enable organizations to manage environments that span the cloud as well as on-premises.

Flash is changing the world. It is enabling innovation and business transformation by allowing companies to do things they simply could not have done before. IDC conducted a global survey of 1,305 executives involved in IT infrastructure and business transformation. The group with the highest flash adoption enjoyed superior business outcomes across a range of areas. Learn more about how flash is unlocking innovation and enabling business transformation with this IDC InfoBrief.